Today, the video camera recorder (Camcorder) has revolutionized how people make home movies. Over the years people have evolved from the use of photo sensitive films developed for projection onto movie screens, to the use of electronic recordings shown on television sets. The television evening news regularly show scenes of floods, hurricanes and other such happenings that have been recorded by amateurs using video cameras. By means of a small and easy to use video camera anyone can replay on their video cassette recorder (VCR) and television set the most trivial to the most significant of events.
Videos are quickly becoming a very important medium of communications. Job applicants resort to submitting their curriculum vitea on videos. New songs on the Hit Parade list have their own promotional videos. "How to operate" videos are now provided with the purchase of home appliances for instance. Television feature documentaries promote the availability of their videos.
Today most North American households have VCR's. Nearly 20 percent have Camcorders. Videos, as a medium of communications have become a pervasive growth phenomena.
Surprisingly, and in spite of today's technology, these electronically recorded videos must be forwarded by mail and courier services if they are to be sent anywhere. There is no electronic communication service available to ferry these videos across the country and around the world.
There is a need to link all these households with an electronic highway for videos. It should be possible to access such an electronic highway through one's TSSP. Once on this highway, it should be possible to reach the desired recipient through the latter's TSSP.
Known telecommunication services were developed and tailormade for the written word (telegraph and telex), for pictures (facsimile) and for the spoken word (telephone). Today, there is a need for a telecommunication service which is tailormade for videos.
Existing public telecommunication services have failed to provide a convenient and economical solution.
Problems in the Art
1-1 Bandwidth
Although videos are often of shorter duration, they require the same standard 6 megahertz broadcast channel bandwidth as normal television programming seen on television. It follows that the inability to come up with a satisfactory videophone over the years is in part due to the large bandwidth required for the satisfactory transmission of video over the public telephone network.
In theory, existing analogue cable televison would have the necessary bandwidth for the transmission of videos. However, in practice, it does not have much spare channel capacity to either receive or send videos.
Although the direct-to-home satellite system (another TSSP) could allow for receiving videos, in practice it only has a normal telephone line as an up-stream link which would not make possible the sending of videos via the satellite system.
For its part, the microwave multipoint distribution systems (MMDS), the new 2.5 gigahertz analogue wireless cable television, has a very limited channel capacity for receiving videos but could be used to send videos from rural areas.
As for the proposed video dial tone networks (which would permit electronic delivery of movies from the video store) they could also be used to receive videos. However, the telephone companies (the creators of such services) are only planning on providing bandwidth in the receive direction. It could not therefore be used to send videos in its currently planned format.
1-2 Public broadband switching network
The necessary interconnecting network, to handle video traffic between TSSPs, does not exist. There is no countrywide public switched broadbband network (PSBN). Even the Internet will require a PSBN to adequately handle its own video requirements.
1-3 Video address
There exists a need to provide a unique address for forwarding videos to their destination and customers of TSSP for their part already have unique addresses within their network but the TSSP per se need unique addresses.
Known solutions
2-1 Bandwidth
Digital transmission providing better quality television signals is now a reality. This has allowed the introduction of digital video compression which can currently cram 8 to 10 video programs onto the standard 6 megahertz of bandwidth. Digital wireless cable, local multipoint communication systems (LMCS), will have the necessary bandwidth and channel capacity to receive and send videos once they become operational sometime in the future. It is anticipated that the cable television companies will begin at least a partial conversion to digital operation within the next 2 to 3 years, making them capable of receiving and sending videos.
The telephone companies can be expected to eventually upgrade their one way video-dial-tone type service to allow for the sending of videos as well.
2-2 Public switched broadband network
The telephone companies are now introducing new digital broadband networks which are based on the asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) for broadband integrated services digital network (B-ISDN).
Related patents
U.S. Pat. No. 5,309,248 to Polidori discloses a system for the simultaneous vision of video pictures reproduced by a transmitting video recorder and a receiving video recorder using a telephone line to extend all commands to the receiving video recorder, which is not a real time video transmission.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,057,932 to Lang discloses an audio/video transceiver apparatus including microwave transceiver means. This is an improved video recorder/transceiver with expanded functionality. It does not possess the communications capabilities which are needed.
Canadian patent # 2,087,434 to Press et al. discloses a companion to a facsimile machine that will transfer and receive data on a floppy disk, hard disk, magnetic tape or optical disk. The telephone line used by this apparatus is the same one the user normally has his facsimile machine connected to. This is strictly a narrowband system.
Canadian patent # 2,088,507 to Trent discloses a method and apparatus for image data processing for transmission along telephone lines. Again, this is strictly a narrowband application.